Billing: From the End-Customer to the Partner

• Retail Billing:
  Retail Billing is the process of collecting usage, aggregating it (for charging purposes), applying required usage charges and service rental fees and potentially discounts and interests and finally generating invoices for the customers. This process may also include receiving and recording payments from customers and allocate those payments against open invoices according to specific allocation rules.
• Interconnect/ Wholesale Billing:
  Whilst Retail billing deals with end customer rating, billing & invoicing, wholesale billing deals with the billing process of the following entities depending on the situation and the nature of business:
• Resellers associated with telecom operators, such as Content Providers, Broadband Resellers etc.
• Interconnect partners for providing interconnection in order to enable end customers make calls to OLOs (Other Licensed Operator) customers.
• Roaming partners for providing services to their customers when they roamed in OLO’s coverage area.
• In case when many partners are actually involved (multilateral agreements) in the value chain of a service provision, the revenue sharing model may also be used.
• Partner Relationship Management:
  PRM constitutes a broader concept than billing itself. It’s a platform that actually supports service providers in complex relationships with partners/suppliers and provides core features such as agreements management (SLAs), regulated services support (LLU, WLR), dispute management, routing optimization (LRC, ASR), reconciliations etc. Apparently, such a platform is extensively integrated with the selected billing system.